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Hello friends, I have been on radio silence for quite some time, as you know. I’m not here to talk about hockey, since there isn’t any, but a little about what it’s like to be living in NYC right now.
I’m entering week four of self-isolation. Frankly, I’m an indoor cat so for me personally it’s been fine. I got my TV, my games, my books. I talk to people (way more than usual) over video chat. My parents call most days.
I’ve heard a slight uptick in sirens, though since I barely register sirens anymore it’s probably more than slight. The streets are empty on the occasions I do have to go out for errands. Today almost everyone I encountered wore masks.
But what’s been really getting me is this weird attitude towards NYC I’ve been seeing. I’m not talking about people saying we have the biggest outbreak because we’re a sanctuary city (gross) or blaming it on the Lunar New Year celebrations (also gross).
Specifically: people saying things like, “Makes sense, New York is so dirty,” or “It’s a gross city,” with this air of Ah Yes in our manicured suburbs this would not happen. Aside from failing to take into account the obvious factors inherent to NYC infrastructure, it just...
...has this vague smug sense of somehow we deserve this. I think that might be one of the most disheartening parts for me—seeing numbers of confirmed cases and deaths rise while simultaneously people shrug and say, well, it figures. Or saying it’s a hoax, or not so bad.
And the thing is, I hope (? maybe not the right word) NYC is the worst hit. I hope this is the worst of the outbreaks we see because it means that it won’t be as bad in other places, even as I know if that is the case people will continue to believe NYC did it to themselves.
All the while I’m watching the outbreak in the city where I live get politicized to all hell while other states get given more PPE and I’m glad they have it I just wish. I just wish we had it too. I don’t know.
I’ve been enjoying some of the off-season content that various hockey teams have been providing. It’s funny, because the last time I lived like this (ie not going out ever) was for financial reasons and then hockey was a huge solace for me. I want it to be again.
But I’m scared of coming out of this and having players echo the same kind of rhetoric I hear about NYC, about why there are PPE shortages, about how it wasn’t that bad, and that fear is related to why I took a huge step back from hockey about, oh, four years ago.
This thread went off in a direction I didn’t intend—kind of thinking aloud here. Now I’m back on to wanting to talk about how sports and politics aren’t inherently separate and why it was difficult for me to continue to engage with a predominantly white, conservative sport
